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It’s been one year since the murder of George Floyd led hundreds of thousands of people to the streets. The massive #BlackLivesMatter protests started in the USA, but quickly people all over the globe partook in the demand for justice, including people in Nijmegen and several other places in the Netherlands.
To reflect on the past year of protests, the Radboud University Anti-Racism Collective and the Race Religion Research Team has invited American philosopher Lewis Gordon and Suus te Braak, organiser of the Nijmegen BLM demonstration, for an online lecture and conversation on Thursday 3 June.
This event is free of charge and will take place on Zoom. When you click on the ticket button (‘Koop Tickets’), you can register for a free ticket. You will receive an email with the link to the Zoom meeting. The program starts at 8.00 PM.
Eight years after the start of BLM, and one year after the huge worldwide protests, police violence continues to take lives. Floyd’s convicted murderer has already demanded a re-trial. Racial justice is still being denied to people across the globe, as it has been for centuries. Lewis Gordon will begin the evening by sharing his political and philosophical reflections on BLM in relation to this larger global and historical context. How do different forms of oppression intersect globally? How can we better grasp these global entanglements from a local level? How can and should we think, conceptualize, and achieve freedom and justice? How does the American context connect to anti-racism movements in the Netherlands, and to Nijmegen specifically.
We will engage these and other questions with Lewis Gordon, whose life and works demonstrate an inspiring commitment to a more just world, and Suus te Braak, one of the initiators of Nijmegen-based collective Dare To Decolonize. Lema Salah will moderate the conversation. At the end of the evening, there will be plenty of space for the audience to ask questions and engage in the discussion.
About the speakers
Lewis R. Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is a philosopher, political thinker, educator, and musician. Gordon’s research in philosophy is in Africana philosophy, philosophy of existence, phenomenology, social and political philosophy, philosophy of culture, race, and racism, aesthetics, philosophy of education, philosophy of science and technology, philosophy of human sciences, philosophy of psychiatry, and philosophy of medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.
As a public intellectual, Gordon has written for a variety of political forums, newspapers, and magazines, and has lectured and organized workshops and political meetings across the globe. He is Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs, where he also has affiliations in Judaic Studies, Caribbean and Latinx Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Global Studies. His visiting appointments include Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, and Honorary Professor in (UHURU) the Unit for the Humanities at the university currently known as Rhodes in South Africa, where he was formerly the Nelson Mandela Distinguished Visiting Chair in Political and International Studies (2014, 2015).
His major works include Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Humanities, 1995), Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, , Her Majesty’s Other Children (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), Existentia Africana(Routledge, 2000), Disciplinary Decadence (Routledge, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge UP, 2008), What Fanon Said (Fordham UP, 2015, and, with Jane Anna Gordon, A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006), which was NetLibrary’s e-book of the month in 2007, Not Only the Master’s Tools (Routledge, 2006), Of Divine Warning (Routledge, 2009), and, with Fernanda Bragato Frizzo, Geopolitics and Decolonization (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017). His most recent book is Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021), 论哲学、去殖民化与种族 (“On Philosophy, Decolonization, and Race”), trans. Li Beilei (Wuhan, China: Wuhan University Press), and Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA and Penguin Book in the UK; German translation, Ullstein Verlag in Germany; Portuguese translation, Todavia in Brazil, forthcoming 2022).
He co-edits, with Jane Anna Gordon and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, the Rowman & Littlefield International book series Global Critical Caribbean Thought, and, with Rozena Maart, Epifania Amoo-Adare, and Sayan Dey, the Routledge-India book series Academics, Politics and Society in the Post-Covid World (Routledge-India).
Suus te Braak (they/them)
Suus is a teacher and queer lifestyle coach. They love meeting people and to learn from them. They also love gatherings, cooking, DJ’ing, bringing joy and when needed being the activist that runs upfront to start positive change in society, whether it is on micro, meso or macro level.
In their work as a teacher they try to teach their students more about ethics, diversity and positions in life. Suus thinks it’s important that students realize and learn that being able to study is a privilege and that you can choose your own methods how to work with that.
As a coach they want to be the person that you can trust and knows the language and different worlds we live in. Living in a binary normative western white society can be challenging. Instead of learning how to adapt to that society, Suus wants to talk and coach their clients in how they can be themselves and let society find a way to adapt to them. We are enough.
Lema Salah (she/her)
Lema Salah is a historian and diversity and inclusivity expert. In addition to a RMA in Historical, Literary & Cultural Studies (RU), she has completed a RMA minor in Gender Studies (Utrecht University). She is specialized in gender politics, military history, conflict studies and UN gender policies. Currently she is associated as a Ph.D. candidate with the Radboud University Nijmegen and the Netherlands Defense Academy. Her current research is focused on military leadership and organizational culture within Defense.
She is a strong advocate for bridging the gap between academia, society and social issues, by engaging in creative ways to make space in academia for larger audiences. But also by bringing the academic work to creative spaces.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson shares with us her innovative thinking on the intricate relations between race, species and the idea of ‘the human’.
In her thought-provoking book Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press, 2020) Jackson scrutinizes key African American, African and Caribbean cultural texts. She argues they generate conceptions of ‘being’ that disrupt the human-animal distinction that persistently reproduces the racial logics and orders of Western thought. Unlike most black studies scholars, Jackson questions the emancipatory promise of ‘humanization’. Instead, she turns to texts by leading scholars and writers like Sylvia Wynter, Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler and others. She uses their work to drive a creation of a new understanding of being that neither relies on animal abjection to define the human, nor reestablishes the need to be recognized as ‘proper human’ within liberal humanism as an antidote to racialization.
PROGRAM
20:00: Introduction by Tundé Adefioye
20:10: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson: ‘Architectures of the Flesh'
20:40: Q&A with the Zoom-audience, facilitated by Tundé Adefioye
21:10: Closing words by Tundé Adefioye
This program is organized by the Race & Research Network at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in cooperation with RHEA, VUB Crosstalks, Kaaitheater and the Race-Religion Constellation project at Radboud Universiteit in the Netherlands. As such this event is part of A series of More-Than-Human Encounters developed by VUB Crosstalks and Kaaitheater, as well as a continuation of the yearly tradition to highlight the International Day Against Racism at the VUB initiated by the Race & Research Network in 2020.
For Tickets, see: https://crosstalks.vub.ac.be/event/race-species-and-becoming-human
As part of Radboud University's Anti-Racism Awareness Week (March 22-26), the race-religion constellation project is involved in two panels on Wednesday, March 24.
I: Conceptualizing Race and Religion: Islamophobia and Antisemitism (10:00-11:30)
Nawal Mustafa, Anya Topolski and Sophie Lauwers will look at the intersection of race and religion and the racialization of religious groups. The discussion will be moderated by Josias Tembo and Justine Bakker. The discussion revolves around the following questions: How have certain religious groups been racialized and how has this shaped specific forms of racism? How do anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism operate in Dutch society and institutions?
II: Islamophobia in the Netherlands and at Radboud (12:00-13:30)
Margreet van Es, Martijn de Koning and Sarah Boulehoual will look at the manner in which Islamophobia affects our society and university. Moderated by Lema Salah, the panel will address the public and political discussions about Islamophobia and the effect it has on the muslim community in the Netherlands.
Register for both panels via:
Please see the attachment for the full schedule for the week. We hope to see you there!
Since the turn of the millennium, the practice of religious slaughter of animals for food consumption has become increasingly politicized in Europe, with over ten countries legally intervening in the practice or heavily debating to do so. This politicization occurs against the backdrop of 9/11, the alleged failure of multiculturalism and the problematization of Islam in Europe. The past decades have also witnessed the maturation of animal welfare as a political concern that is represented on local, national and European parliamentarian level. In her PHD research, Mariska Jung focuses on the conceptual questions and entanglements of race, religion and species that emerge from the political debate on religious slaughter. In this presentation, she will outline her general research framework and discuss parts of her work so far.
This event is co-organized by RHEA and EDGE
Time: 12.30-14.00, Thursday 10 December
Venue: will be communicated depending on corona measures
Registration required by sending an email to susan.dierickx@vub.be
Please join the Race and Religion Constellation team for an online conversation Tuesday 22 September on Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World authored by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. Jackson is a black feminist scholar and assistant professor in English at the University of Southern California, USA. In Becoming Human, she grapples with the enduring relationship between animality and blackness in Western science and philosophy. Studying African diasporic literary and visual culture and straddling the disciplines of philosophy, art and science, Jackson develops a new understanding of black ontology that both critiques and displaces the racializing and animalizing logics underpinning Western thought.
In this session, we will discuss the book and any kind of question it stirs up within us. What kind of conceptual implications can we discern from thinking blackness from the perspective of animalization for theorizing the race-religion constellation? How do we envision the political implications Jackson’s theory has for doing anti-racist work? How, if at all, does the book resonate with our own individual scholarly, artistic or activist terrains of interest? These and more, or other, questions can be posed during the session. It will be an open forum for collective exploration and exchange.
We encourage you to get a copy of the book and read it, but if you are pressed for time consider to check out the interviews with Jackson on podcasts such as Parallax View and Always Already Podcast, or watch a recording of the online book launch on YouTube.
Please confirm your participation with Mariska Jung via mariska.jung@vub.be.